371–380 of 538 posts
Where does Anthropic or OpenAI winning leave us? Dependents of an AI-megacorp for our "facts"? Our software? Our work? It's possible these companies will become everyone's boss, and will dictate to everyone what everyone is allowed to work on, think, say, do, believe, etc. Before Big Tech springs that trap, we must support and divert resources to open models.
I agree but we are dependent mostly on Chinese models at this point to pull it off.
I agree but we are dependent mostly on Chinese models at this point to pull it off.
where they came from doesn't matter so much so long as they are open weights and I can run on servers I control.
I would be totally willing to pay $50 per month to support an open source AI lab, rather to get open source models as byproducts of corporations.
I've been contemplating a decentralized model training system for some time using volunteer machines that we all contribute. But, it is astronomically difficult. The communication speeds are untenable. And, there is the issue of data poisoning from untrusted nodes. I've almost cracked that last issue with a self-healing checkpointed rollback system that doesn't have to throw out anything that follows the corrupt datu…
there was a project trying to achieve some of those goals a few years ago using p2p: petals https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/petals their bloom model was also a collaborative effort https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/en/model_doc/bloom
I've been contemplating a decentralized model training system for some time using volunteer machines that we all contribute. But, it is astronomically difficult. The communication speeds are untenable. And, there is the issue of data poisoning from untrusted nodes. I've almost cracked that last issue with a self-healing checkpointed rollback system that doesn't have to throw out anything that follows the corrupt datu…
Also, it wouldn't be able to use a transformer architecture. For inspiration, take a look at Google Maps and how it a much more efficient A* divide/conquer hill-climbing architecture. Think minimized matrix math.
Where does Anthropic or OpenAI winning leave us? Dependents of an AI-megacorp for our "facts"? Our software? Our work? It's possible these companies will become everyone's boss, and will dictate to everyone what everyone is allowed to work on, think, say, do, believe, etc. Before Big Tech springs that trap, we must support and divert resources to open models.
I'd argue that they already are to some extend, given that well-educated people have no saying on the matter when it comes to extensive use (and by extend reinforcement training) of their models. Well, they have a saying, but exercising that means they're willing to end up without a job.
Now, as far as "what is truth" is concerned, the models are already biased towards notions and opinions that are accepted to some degree by Western values. I had an argument with Claude (why would the tool even argue?) that started by asking it what makes a man attractive, which sent it on a yap on how beauty is subjective, there's no objective way to measure beauty (which implies there's no objective way to improve it), and at some point I was just fed up with how dogged it was to convince me of a value judgement that I don't hold.
It's not about how true or false that value is, it's about what we're going to do the moment someone else dictates the values that exist within the models? What happens when what is trained isn't what you agree? Who's to decide what gets to be reinforced and what's not?
The HN crowd is too deep into productivity rampage to discuss the ethical and moral implications of having a machine so powerful that it spreads worldviews as facts, by whichever government/entity happens to be behind the wheel. At least in the case of extremist forums I can just visit different communities. But what happens when there's only a few winners in the AI race, and the cost of just walking away is too high to pay?
Remember: Google started with "do no evil" and where is that now?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If closed-source AGI wins, it is not going to be much different from a safety perspective anyway, because AI capability research is advancing faster than safety research.
Closed Source AI at least can be controlled. See the directive of the US government regarding Fable (even if one disagrees about the directive there is no doubt that it is effective in shutting it off) or the safe guards by a corporate structure (even a profit driven one). It is schizophrenic to praise Anthropic for refusing the Department of War full access to their models but at the same time root for Open Source m…
(For example, I suspect that plenty of folks would view the recently threatened mass scan of the DN42 hobby network as an instance of misaligned agentic behavior that would have wasted non-trivial resources, and I also think that most observers would pin the specific behavior of that AI on a proprietary SOTA model, not an open one. That's clearly not a disaster-level event, but it should scare you if you're concerned about alignment.)
I've been contemplating a decentralized model training system for some time using volunteer machines that we all contribute. But, it is astronomically difficult. The communication speeds are untenable. And, there is the issue of data poisoning from untrusted nodes. I've almost cracked that last issue with a self-healing checkpointed rollback system that doesn't have to throw out anything that follows the corrupt datu…